not just so, nature makes a fine vinegar. We watch. We test. We try to control. Sometimes we alter the timing. But you are right. Miss Dorothy. The grapes really do it themselves. Now, here is one of our storage or aging cellars.'
He led them into a building, not a cellar in any sense of being below the surface of the ground. It was a room filled, packed, with huge redwood tanks that were nothing in the world but mammoth barrels.
Sudden pygmies, Johnny and the girls looked about them. Each tank held something hke 20,000 gallons. A tank was made of staves—staves that were almost 3 inches thick. It was hooped with metal hoops. These monsters stood in the dimness they created, haunch to haunch, and all around them rose the acid-tinged smell of the wine.
Bart began to point out the two valves at the bottom of each tank, to explain how the wine was pumped in, pumped out. Portable pumps were used, he said.
In each huge curving side, low down, there was an oval—marked by a seam, a possible crack—to the center of which oval a handle seemed attached. The oval looked to be no more than 14 or 15 inches at its widest. When Bart explained that after a tank had been emptied, and its inside needed cleaning, this oval piece could be removed to admit a hving man, the girls murmured astonishment.
Bart found one of the big buxom barrels even then being pumped out. He promised them that, in a few minutes, they would see for themselves how the oval was tapped with a rubber mallet, pushed inward, and then removed.
At the other end of the place, a steep flight of wooden steps went up to a catwalk. Bart said there were bungs above, which must be removed when tlie wine was being drawn out at the bottom, lest the top of the tank be sucked inward. The girls followed him up the steps. Dick and Johnny climbed behind.
From above the sight was very strange. The walks had handrails, but one could see straight down into the dizzy depths of the narrow spaces, between the barrels, to the distant floor. Bart leaned upon the rail, talking, talking.
Johnny found it all mildly interesting. But not especially colorful. The old romantic image of laughing peasants with their bare empurpled feet faded reluctantly from the furniture of his mind.
Johnny began to think about other things. Bart had the girls' attention. Johnny said to Dick, 'Did Nathaniel Baitee have much to do with the business?'
'My father?' Dick looked sideways. 'He painted.'
'Did he sell his paintings?''
Dick said amiably, 'Not many. Why?'
Johnny answered only with a shrug. He walked away from the group, along the narrow boards, gazing absent-mindedly downward. He saw a man come into the building. He recognized Blanche's father, the lawyer, Marshall.
Marshall spoke to the worker at the tank. Bart saw him and called down.
'No hurry, Bart,' Marshall called back. 'I'll wait.'
Bart turned back to his audience. 'A European,'' he was saying, 'doesn't miud lees in the bottle. He knows they signify age, which is good. But Americans want a wine that is perfectly clear. So we have what we call a polishing filter.'
Johnny, hands in his pockets, strolled farther, gazing down. The workman was moving away. He had, indeed, opened that oval place. Marshall stood waiting, looking cmiously about him. Johnny could see, on the top of his head, where the hair thinned.
Dick Bartee came up behind Johnny. 'What was in your mind,' Dick asked softly, 'about my father?'
Johnny didn't look at him. 'Oh, that safe. The money. I understand you knew how to open the safe?'
'The combiotttion wasn't much of a secret within the family,' Dick answered, rather casually.
'I understand your grandfather didn't always count his money?'
'He had a kind of petty cash. Where do you pick up this stuff?' Dick was friendly, easy.
Johnny was straining to see back seventeen years. He could see Dick, in the school, getting out for no better reason than that his rooDimate had gone out. Dick, needing cash. Could enter the house. Could open the safe. Christy, awake, perhaps on accoimt of her baby, hearing something. Christy downstairs, to protest. To threaten to call the old man. Dick angry. And one blow vdth a candlestick. Then, what?
What about the pin? Had it fallen, having been somehow on top of things? Had Dick put it in his pocket? Then, fading silently away from crime and punishment, forgotten he had it?
Then, when Nathaniel's pin had miraculously put Mc-
Cauley on the spot, Dick keeping thankfully still. And using Christy's pin . . .
Johnny said aloud, 'You stole from Kate, you admit. It came natural, did it? I have one question. Why the devil did you keep Christy's pin? How could you have known you could use it later?'
Dick didn't reply. His face looked hard.
Johnny paid vague attention to Marshall below, who now crouched to peer curiously into the egg-shaped hole in the side of the great cask. It would be black dark inside. Mr. Marshall took a packet of matches from his pocket. Johnny, his mind misty with imagining the past, yet knew that Dick Bartee stiffened, and did so too late for this to have been a reaction to Johnny's question. Dick Bartee had both hands on tlie rail and they tightened.
It was Bart who shouted from the far end of the walk. 'Drop it! Marshall! Don't light that match!'
'What?' Marshall looked up.
'Drop it!' Bart shouted.
'O.K., O.K.' the lawyer said in the huff of the startled who had meant no harm.
